Disabling Facebook’s New Facial Recognition Feature

By Jeff Gamet

Jun 8th, 2011 7:45 PM EDT

The social networking site Facebook has a history of adding new features that can potentially have a negative impact on your online privacy, and the company’s latest addition — facial recognition that suggests photos of you for friends to tag — is no different. Unless you know where to look to disable automatic facial recognition, you can’t shut it off, and you may not even realize your face is being served up to people without your knowledge.

If you want to disable Facebook’s automatic facial recognition feature, do this:

Disabling automatic facial recognition will stop Facebook from combing through user’s accounts for photos of you, but it won’t stop someone from manually tagging your face in a photo. You should, however, get a notification should someone tag you in a photo so you have a chance to un-tag yourself and help keep at least a modicum of online privacy.